Time Travel

One of my favorite aspects of photography is the ability to paint an abstract picture with the lighting available to you in everyday situations. It allows you to capture a more conceptual aspect of a scene, instead of just one specific moment. When you learn how to limit and exploit the light around you, you begin to open up a whole new world of photographic opportunity. It allows you to turn an ordinary picture into something that has much more to say.

No photomanip besides black and white, and slight contrast adjustment. I also cropped a small amount of the sky out, as I always leave room enough in the original comp. to print at 35mm format. In this shot I used an ND8 filter to limit the afternoon light coming into my lens. This allowed me to do a longer exposure, and create a message of travel and speed, as the evening commute train passed me by. Just because photography is a single static image, doesn't mean you can't capture the world of motion and dynamic change. I hope you will enjoy this piece

Technical:
There are several ways to capture a shot of a moving object. The simplest is to approach it late at night, or late evening, when light is low enough to obtain naturally long shutter speeds without the use of extra equipment or filters. This and any type of photography of moving objects requires a tripod though, so that the rest of the image (not moving) remains sharp and clear.

This image was taken early-evening though, when lighting is strong enough that automatic camera modes will still be fast enough to capture a fast, frozen image. To counter this (allow myself to do a long exposure), I used a Neutral Density filter, which lowers the light coming in signifigantly enough to require a long shutter speed for a properly exposed image (anything over 1/60th of a second). I also increased this further by using a high aperature, of 22. All in all, I needed an exposure of 1.5 seconds to obtain a properly exposed image at this point. This allowed the train to make a sizable trek across the frame before the image was through being taken, and in the end, give me a photograph of a train in quick motion.

Even at this point, there are multiple techniques to obtain different results. A flash could have been used to freeze the train at the beginning of the image, giving more definition to the front, before the motion streaks appear. A rear-sync flash could have been used to freeze the train at the end of the shot, giving a feeling of forward motion, with motion streaks behind it. I chose though, to take a shot without any flah, giving a simple concept of motion and confusion. This keeps any of the frontal portion of the train from being crisply captured, allowing only the cotinuous sides to take shape, while the front is speedily streaked across the frame. The reason for the mid-section of the train appearing more clear than the frontal part is because part of the frame had 'train' in it the entire 1.5 seconds. In other words, the train had already reached that part of the image, and remained there through the entire exposure. The faded blurred parts represent parts of the frame where the train hadn't reached at the time of releashing the shutter, but reached before the 1.5 second exposure was complete.

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Location: Main Line, out of Philadelphia, USA
Camera: Nikon D70s
Lens: Nikkor 18-70mm 3.5 @ 30mm
Shutter: 1.5 seconds
Aperature: 22
Tripod: Vanguard
Filter: Skylight 1A, Cokin ND8

Full view, please!